To fit into male-dominated spaces, women are told to fix a lot of things: stop using “sorry” and “just” in emails, avoid vocal fry and upspeak, and “watch your tone” at all times.

But more than anything else, women are told that it’s a lack of confidence that’s really holding us back. If only we could get over imposter syndrome, and internalize our successes instead of feeling like serially lucky frauds, we’d be unstoppable.

Too bad it doesn’t work like that. There is a very real external bias against women’s competence, and nobody gets around it by being more confident. In fact, as we see through the experiences of Hillary Clinton and Melissa Harris-Perry, being more confident can result in harsh pushback when you’re pursuing leadership positions within male-dominated environments. Because how dare you.

While we’re so busy focusing on what women should and should not do, there’s a big problem going undiagnosed: entitlement syndrome. The opposite of imposter syndrome, entitlement syndrome is the problem of overconfident, mediocre white men. After I break down competence bias, I’ll get into what entitlement syndrome looks like, and what some concrete solutions might be.

First: The odd pairing of Hillary Clinton and MHP in a header. No comment from Hillary Clinton has ever indicated that she is aware of MHP’s existence, her show, or of the many negative remarks from MHP about her over the years. But MHP has gone after HRC enough to have made me quit watching her now-defunct show long before its demise. More than three years ago this was the final straw for me.

When I posted this yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s Kitten Heels Not Necessarily A Shoo-In, it triggered a few emails from folks apparently not willing to post publicly in a comment thread all of which took the same tone. As if talking to a six-year-old afraid of the thunder, these presumably younger, less bitter and burnt voices assured Gen-Hillary, bitter, old Boomer me that no-no-no-no-no! If she runs in 2016, Hillary will not experience the same nasty treatment she received in 2008, not at all! Not with those high approval ratings! Bill’s wife will not be treated as appendage of his now that she has blazed her own path (as if she had not already done that in the Senate before her presidential campaign). It will be kinder, gentler campaign coverage. Yeah, right. And as if on cue, this. I will let the video* speak for itself.

“Rebecca, author of “big girls don’t cry.” she is the Hillary fan I like to bring to balance out the Hillary hate that will emerge from me if i am not careful.” – Melissa Harris Perry, MSNBC, 02-03-2013

MHP’s imaginary relationship with Hillary Clinton has always, oddly, been based on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind despite Hillary Clinton having very few, if any, personality traits in common with Scarlett O’Hara and MHP continually casting herself inexplicably as some variety of anti-Mammy despite her contention that Mammy is the actual brain of the O’Hara clan. Choosing Rebecca Traister as her “pro-Hillary” foil on that broadcast was most befuddling, first because Traister was not especially pro-Hillary in her opus Big Girls Don’t Cry, and second because MHP had access to several truly pro-Hillary women among her own colleagues and connections at MSNBC at the time.

The second reason the Huffpo article is interesting is MHP’s claim that she lost editorial control over her show for wanting to discuss Beyonce’s Formation video.

The day after Super Bowl 2016, everybody was talking about Beyonce’s Formation in terms most amazing to me. As someone who spent time visiting the Black Panther HQ in New Haven somewhat regularly in 1970 and 1971, it would never have entered my head to draw any kind of parallel between what Beyonce and her ensemble performed and the men and women I knew in New Haven who provided a breakfast program for kids, day care services, and after-school tutoring for school kids in a colorfully painted basement room along with a laundry list of community services for neighbors behind the walls of a sandbagged, two story clapboard house. They did not wear black, leather, or cartridge belts. I never saw firearms or ammunition in that house, if there were any. So references to that performance as representing Black Panther women were, to me, uninformed and misleading. Apparently, though, that conflict with history was not the intended focus of MHP’s treatment of the video.

When I saw the movie Black Panther Woman around the middle of this month, I had planned to do a post about Kathleen Cleaver and put it on hold as other women organically came into the spotlight. In light of this HuffPo article, now is the time – I’ll seize it.

Many know of Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information of the BPP and author of Soul on Ice. His wife, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, is a woman we should meet, recognize, and give her due. She’s a very impressive person!

She was in charge of organizing a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, Kathleen met the minister of information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver. She moved to San Francisco in November 1967 to join the Black Panther Party. Kathleen Neal and Eldridge Cleaver were married on December 27, 1967. Cleaver became the communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making body. She also served as the spokesperson and press secretary. Notably, she organized the national campaign to free the Party’s minister of defense, Huey Newton, who was jailed. Kathleen Neal Cleaver was among a small group of women that were prominent in the Black Panther Party, which included Elaine Brown and Ericka Huggins.[1] In 1968 (the same year her husband ran for president on the Peace and Freedom ticket) she ran for California‘s 18th state assembly district, also as a candidate of the Peace and Freedom party. Cleaver received 2,778 votes[2] for 4.7% of the total vote, finishing third in a four-candidate race.

INTERVIEWER: In retrospect, what was the Civil Rights revolution all about?

CLEAVER: By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed by the United States Congress, the process of legal change and elimination of official racism was legally completed, but it was not socially completed.

The government that was interested in encouraging the end of restrictions on voting and education on the basis of race didn’t do very much on the level of changing basic attitudes. So where you have a cessation of the implementation by law of racist practices, you really have never seen any major effort on the part of the government or the larger institutions to transform attitudes. And that is where we’ve failed.

INTERVIEWER: What was it that was appealing to you about the Black Panther Party?

CLEAVER: I encountered the Black Panther Party when I was in SNCC. I had gotten involved with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee at the same time that it articulated black power as its position. I was a student in New York, and I started working in the New York office. The Black Power Movement challenged all the preconceived notions of blacks not being able to determine their own destiny. It was essentially a very nationalistic self-determination position. And what appealed to me about the Black Panther Party was that it took that position of self-determination and articulated it in a local community structure, had a program, had a platform and an implementation through the statement of how blacks should exercise community control over education, housing, business, military service.

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: June 17, 2000

In the days of the New Haven trials, I drove around with my homemade “Free Ericka” sticker on my car window. The point was that Ericka Huggins was unarmed and thus could not have committed the crime of which she was accused.

What MHP was planning to do with Beyonce’s video appears unrelated to the BPP and what they represented and accomplished. That might have qualified as informative, relevant, and appropriate to news media. But MHP never was a true member of the fourth estate, and a cable news hour is not an elective course in political theory.

It should be noted that Eldridge Cleaver ultimately endorsed Ronald Reagan and joined the LDS Church. Kathleen is a graduate of Yale U and Yale Law and a longtime professor of law. “By any means necessary” turned out, very quickly, to be working within the system and never had anything to do with guns and ammo belts.

It is important to get the history right. It is also important to learn from history. Three years ago Millennials and Gen-xers emailed me condescendingly to assure me that there was no way Hillary Clinton would ever again be the target of biased, sexist media. Maybe they thought that the revolution was over. If those same Millennials now follow Bernie Sanders and his call to revolution, they misunderstand the nature of the American Revolution. It is never over. The American Revolution has continued for what will be 241 years next month.

It is one revolution that continues and progresses in extending equal rights to all. It is not a new thing invented in the lifetime of 20-year olds. The American Revolution is the establishment. It is the system. It is the way we have made progress given the right leadership – i.e.- leadership that understands how all aspects of inclusion and participation in our democracy intersect.

There are imposters and the entitled. It is important that we discern them correctly.

***********************************

Edited to add: And now this from HuffPo today. Millennials and Gen-Xers needn’t bother to email me with any horse manure. Been through this before, as I said this first time. If you pull again what you did in Feb. 2013, I will publish the emails and your email addresses.

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